Principal Investigator:
Eva Wittenberg
I am interested in how the mind assembles meaning, how this capacity came to be, and how it interacts with other cognitive abilities. I investigate the decisions that speakers face when they wrap their messages in grammar. Speakers make structural choices dozens of times per day, and listeners rapidly process them, make inferences about why something was said in a particular way, and create a representation of the speaker’s intended meaning in their minds.
Here is a short CV (email me for a comprehensive one!)
Ph.D. students:
Elena Marx
In general, my research focuses on questions at the interface of event perception and language. I am interested in how temporal relations between events are perceived, how such relations are encoded by language, and what the preconditions in temporal and event cognition are to understand and represent sequential relations between events. In this regard, I am looking into the developmental aspects of event cognition.
Ebru Evcen (based at UC San Diego)
Broadly speaking, I am interested in the issues at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics cross-linguistically. My research focuses on how, as language unfolds, we incrementally build representations of the events described by that unfolding language and how speakers develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during comprehension. Currently, I am looking at how people interpret counterfactuals.
Intern:
Yutong Liang
I am a 1st year BA Undergraduate student studying Quantitative Social Science Program at Central European University, Vienna, coming from China. As a rising sophomore, I’m concentrating on Data Science and Economics. My background is in data analysis, with skills in Python, STATA, R, and basic JavaScript. Currently, I am working on a topic related to the Gender Gap in Crime and how we can study gender inequality using National Incident-Based Reporting System datasets. I received an Inaugural Class Tuition Award when I joined CEU in 2021.
Research Assistant:
Attila Balla
I am a 1st-year student in the Two-year MA Program in Political Science at CEU. I also hold a degree in psychology. I am generally interested in political psychology and communication, and quantitative analysis of political texts.